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The latest incident, which led to an FBI investigation, occurred in December but was never disclosed to the public.

University officials said there was no health threat.

The remains of the dead mice were contained in a red hazardous waste bag being stored in a locked freezer, according to the researchers. But an animal care supervisor could not account for them while preparing to sterilize and incinerate them.

In September 2005, the same lab discovered three live mice infected with plague missing from multiple cages. Officials then said the animals had likely died.

University officials yesterday said they immediately contacted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI and state health officials in December upon learning of the missing remains, but withheld information from the public until The Star-Ledger began asking questions. They subsequently released a report about the matter in a mass e-mailing to the university community, saying they did not want employees, students and professors to read about the incident in the newspaper.

FBI officials confirmed the December incident.

“As a matter of protocol in this type of matter, the FBI was called in to investigate and we determined there was no nexus to terrorism or risk to public health,” said Bryan Travers, a spokesman for the FBI office in Newark.

The state Department of Health and Senior Services said it had also been notified of the situation, “and we are very confident that the appropriate authorities are investigating,” said spokeswoman Donna Leusner.

University officials defended their decision to keep the matter confidential.

“If this were a public health risk, we couldn’t afford to keep it a secret,” said Diane Weathers, UMDNJ’s senior vice president for university advancement and communications. “Plague sounds like it is Black Death. It would have been irresponsible to raise concerns.”

The UMDNJ facility — the Public Health Research Institute — is a leading center for research on infectious diseases. It has a Level 3 biocontainment lab that works with diseases that are lethal or can cause serious health problems, including bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, West Nile virus and typhoid fever.

The mice were part an ongoing work in a federally funded biodefense program to find vaccinations that could be effective for the plague, which terrorism experts fear could be used as a biological weapon.

Lab officials said the mice were infected with the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic and other forms of plague — an infectious disease that has claimed more than 30 million lives through history and even today sparks fear and panic around the world, although with modern antibiotics, plague can be treated if quickly diagnosed.

David Perlin, the director of the Public Health Research Institute, said the discovery that the infected mice carcasses were missing came on Dec. 19, while the remains of hundreds of subject animals were being sterilized and incinerated. He said they believed two bags stuck to each other and were autoclaved together, but said they notified authorities because they had to rule out any possibility of foul play.

An FBI agent was on site later that same day, and the lab staff was interviewed throughout the weekend by the FBI.

According to Perlin, all evidence collected to date indicates that the bag containing the two missing mice was frozen to another bag and both bags were sterilized and incinerated simultaneously.

“I’m confident we run a safe and secure facility. We run a first-rate operation, and we will be out of business fast if people don’t believe we have credibility,” he said. “We have very strict controls. Safety. Security. Everything. But you’re always running the risk of even a very small minor incident, which is what this is.”

Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist who has been a critic of the government’s rapid expansion of bioterrorism labs, said while the likelihood is that someone made an accounting error, it was a potentially embarrassing situation for UMDNJ.

“It is essential where such activities are carried out that security is at the highest levels and records be maintained for a long period of time, if not indefinitely,” Ebright said.

“He saw what he perceived as a threat and thought he was shot, and based on that both officers discharged their firearms,” said Dino Bardoni, commander of investigations.

No one was hurt in the 11:24 p.m. incident at North Sanborn Road and Freedom Parkway, but the couple’s SUV was riddled with bullet holes and its rear window was shattered.

Police are releasing few details about the incident or case and have characterized it as a “priority investigation,” Bardoni said.

It’s the fourth officer-involved shooting in the city in the past seven months, two of which were fatal.

Interim Police Chief Daniel Ortega refused to discuss the most recent case, referring all questions to Bardoni.

Bardoni said the incident began when one officer stopped the vehicle because one of its license plate lights was not working. He was joined shortly thereafter by a second officer.

Bardoni said the primary officer was in the midst of contacting the vehicle’s occupants, a driver and passenger, when the problem began.

“He was walking up to them, nothing out of the ordinary,” Bardoni said, when there was the perception of a threat and the officer thought he’d been shot.

Police later determined that the couple was unarmed.

Neither of the vehicle’s occupants was arrested or cited.

American spy chiefs have told the President that the CIA has launched a vast spying operation in the UK to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being launched from Britain.

They believe that a British-born Pakistani extremist entering the US under the visa waiver programme is the most likely source of another terrorist spectacular on American soil.

Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5, the British security service.

A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain.

And a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama told The Sunday Telegraph that the CIA has stepped up its efforts in the last month after the Mumbai massacre laid bare the threat from Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the attacks, which has an extensive web of supporters in the UK.

The CIA has already spent 18 months developing a network of agents in Britain to combat al-Qaeda, unprecedented in size within the borders of such a close ally, according to intelligence sources in both London and Washington.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama, told The Sunday Telegraph: “The British Pakistani community is recognised as probably al-Qaeda’s best mechanism for launching an attack against North America.

“The American security establishment believes that danger continues and there’s very intimate cooperation between our security services to monitor that.” Mr Riedel, who served three presidents as a Middle East expert on the White House National Security Council, added: “President Obama’s national security team are well aware that this is a serious threat.”

The British official said: “The Americans run their own assets in the Pakistani community; they get their own intelligence. There’s close cooperation with MI5 but they don’t tell us the names of all their sources.

“Around 40 per cent of CIA activity on homeland threats is now in the UK. This is quite unprecedented.”

Explaining the increase in CIA activity over the past month, Mr Riedel added: “In the aftermath of the Mumbai attack the US and the UK intelligence services now have to regard Lashkar-e-Taiba as just as serious a threat to both of our countries as al-Qaeda. They have a much more extensive base among Pakistani Diaspora communities in the UK than al–Qaeda.”

Information gleaned by CIA spies in Britain has already helped thwart several terrorist attacks in the UK and was instrumental in locating Rashid Rauf, a British-born al-Qaeda operative implicated in a plot to explode airliners over the Atlantic, who was tracked down and killed in a US missile strike in November.

But some US intelligence officers are irritated that valuable manpower and resources have been diverted to the UK. One former intelligence officer who does contract work for the CIA dismissed Britain as a “swamp” of jihadis.

Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, admitted in January that the Security Service alone does not have the resources to maintain surveillance on all its targets. “We don’t have anything approaching comprehensive coverage,” he said.

The dramatic escalation in CIA activity in the UK followed the exposure in August 2006 of Operation Overt, the alleged airline bomb plot.

The British intelligence official revealed that CIA chiefs sent more resources to the UK because they were not prepared to see American citizens die as a result of MI5’s inability to keep tabs on all suspects, even though the Security Service successfully uncovered the plot.

MI5 manpower will have doubled to 4,100 by 2011 but many in the US intelligence community do not think that is enough.

For their part, some British officials are queasy that information obtained by the CIA from British Pakistanis was used to help target Mr Rauf, a British citizen, whom they would have preferred to capture and bring to trial.

Sensitivities over the intelligence arrangement formed a key part of briefings given to Mr Obama, since they are central to what is often called “the most special part of the special relationship” and could complicate his dealings with Gordon Brown.

Tensions in transatlantic intelligence relations which were laid bare last week during the High Court battle over Binyam Mohamed, the British resident held in Guanatanamo Bay. British judges wanted to publish details of the torture administered to Mr Mohamed, an Ethiopian national, in US custody. But key paragraphs were blacked out after American officials threatened it could damage intelligence sharing between the two countries.

Intelligence experts said that a trusting intelligence relationship, in which one country does not publish intelligence data obtained by the other, is vital to both countries’ national security.

Patrick Mercer, chairman of the House of Commons counter-terrorism sub-committee, said: “The special relationship is a huge benefit to us. It clearly works to our advantage and helps keep the people of the UK and the US safe.

“There is no doubt that a great deal of valuable intelligence vital to British national security is procured by American agents from British sources.”

Mr Riedel added: “The partnership between the two intelligence communities is dynamic; it is one of great intimacy. We overuse the term special relationship, but this is an extraordinarily special relationship.

…

ABC News said Davis provided it with a print-out of her computerised client list, a copy of which she offered to prosecutors.

“They showed no interest. Some of these guys, I was invoicing on corporate credit cards,” she said.

The Daily Telegraph has learned that the 85-year-old former US secretary of state met President Dmitry Medvedev for secret negotiations in December. According to Western diplomats, during two days of talks the octogenarian courted Russian officials to win their support for Mr Obama’s initiative, which could see Russia and the United States each slashing their nuclear warheads to 1,000 warheads.

The decision to send Mr Kissinger to Moscow, taken by Mr Obama when he was still president-elect, is part of a plan to overcome probable Republican objections in Congress.

Mr Kissinger is believed to have won a verbal rather than written undertaking for the deal. Tom Graham, a senior associate at Kissinger Associates and a former member of the national security council in the White House, on Thursday confirmed that Mr Kissinger had met Mr Medvedev but denied that any negotiations had taken place and said he had not met with Mr Putin.

However, a diplomatic source said that Mr Kissinger held two days of talks with Mr Putin at his country house near Moscow.

While the details of the ambitious initiative are yet to be revealed, the proposal to return to the negotiating table after eight years of reluctance in Washington has been welcomed in Britain and elsewhere.

Mr Obama apparently chose Mr Kissinger for his consummate diplomatic skills and his popularity in Moscow, an affection earned by his open acknowledgment of Russia’s international resurgence.

Despite his pariah status with many Left-wingers in Mr Obama’s Democratic Party, the president forged relations with Mr Kissinger during his campaign.

In a monthly budget update, the CBO noted $284 billion in spending for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which was enacted last October to help banks and other financial institutions.

Among the offices forced to close Friday were the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Consumer Affairs. The governor’s Office of Emergency Services also was dark as part of the cash-saving move ordered by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Critical and revenue-generating agencies remained open, including fire stations, parks and employment centers that process unemployment insurance claims. California’s unemployment rate is 9.3 percent, a 15-year high.

At the state Department of Transportation, a handful of engineers showed up to work without pay because they didn’t want to get behind on projects they said were important to public safety.

Stan Slavin, an electrical engineer working on a traffic project in the San Francisco Bay area, said his partners at local agencies will be on the job so he was, too.

Until today it has been the work of activists, journalists and a handful of academics like Clive Norris of Sheffield University to warn of the dangers to our freedom and privacy posed by the database state. Now it is official. There could be no more authoritative judgment than this measured report, Surveillance Citizens and the State, produced by the Lord’s constitution committee. The report says that mass surveillance “risks undermining the fundamental relationship between the state and citizens, which is the cornerstone of democracy and good governance”.

It paints a picture of a governing class that has become obsessed with the collection of personal data. The public is “often unaware of the vast amount of information about them that is kept and exchanged between organisations” This will be greatly increased if Jack Straw’s coroners’ and justice bill is allowed to pass through the Commons, with Labour manipulating the parliamentary schedule so that the data-sharing proposals contained in it go largely unscrutinised.

Passage of the bill into law would repeal the federal regulation prohibiting raw milk and raw milk products for human consumption in interstate commerce. The regulation 21 CFR 1240.61 provides, in part, that “no person shall cause to be delivered into interstate commerce or shall sell, otherwise distribute, or hold for sale or other distribution after shipment in interstate commerce any milk or milk product in final package form for direct human consumption unless the product has been pasteurized….”

The bill would not force a state to legalize the sale of raw milk by producers within its boundaries nor would it force a state to allow the sale of raw milk from out-of-state producers in its retail stores. The bill would enable consumers to enter into transactions to obtain raw milk and raw milk products from other states without the transactions being in violation of federal law.